Michael van Zoggel (Outcomex)
Outcomex is pressing ahead with plans to build out an enhanced vendor portfolio of cyber security solutions to complement increased levels of certification amid a maturity of managed services capabilities.
The move comes in direct response to increased threat levels across Australia, underpinned by the sobering reality that the region is now high on the list of targets for cyber attackers.
According to EDGE Research -- commissioned by ARN in partnership with Tech Research Asia -- security ranks as the no.1 priority for customers across Australia in 2021, shaped by a desire to modernise technology and keep current IT operations running while improving security, governance, risk and compliance.
Such sentiment is heightening end-user reliance on outsourcing with 35 per cent of businesses nationwide increasing project work with external partners, citing the most in-demand third-party skills as security, cloud migration and data management.
Customer demand for partner expertise comes with a caveat however, chiefly the expectation of “deep skills in relevant solutions” alongside the ability to provide “end-to-end” offerings supported by a strong market reputation.
“Customers are maturing their security efforts at a high rate of pace,” observed Michael van Zoggel, managing director of Outcomex. “This means that customers are evolving their thinking, investment profile and approach to the market far more holistically as time goes by.
“This also elevates the importance of our strategy of having completeness of vendor portfolio to ensure we are well suited to engage the right partners at the right time, to empower our customers on their cyber framework initiatives.”
As a result, Outcomex is evolving managed service provider (MSP) offerings to sharpen managed security services (MSS) in an attempt to build more internal capabilities and depth of expertise. The Sydney-based business has hired cyber security specialists focusing on strategic governance, risk and compliance (GRC) activities which in turn waterfalls through to framework fulfilment and gap analysis.
From there, point services are also available -- namely penetration testing, security assessments and auditing among others -- to fulfil end-user compliance requirements, as well as more traditional project-based efforts to implement protective infrastructures.
“These capabilities are overlaid through the deployment of SIEM platforms, tuning and optimisation activities, and then managed via managed security services including triage, incident response, auditing, patch management, reporting and other day-to-day tasks,” van Zoggel explained. “We see our MSS offerings as highly adjunctive to our infrastructure managed services, which form an extremely important part of our overall business activities.”
Enhancing application security
A core component of Outcomex’s enhanced cyber framework is application security protection, underpinned by a new partnership with Radware specific to the delivery of distributed denial of service (DDoS) and web application firewall (WAF) solutions.
Terms of the alliance will see the business offer Radware’s entire portfolio of application security services, spanning protection offerings across data centre, public cloud, hybrid environments and applications.
“The number of attacks on Internet-facing assets is increasing and Radware is one of the very few solutions in the market that can offer end-to-end capabilities to protect such assets,” van Zoggel added.
According to EDGE Research, partners continue to place increased emphasis on security and managed services across Australia, with 73 per cent of technology providers seeking to add new vendors to support strategic business priorities. Within this context, 84 per cent of partners committed to increased staff training during 2021 with 75 per cent pursuing more certifications.
“We have been working through the certification path with Radware to ensure we have great coverage from an engineering perspective, covering pre-sales, design, implementation and ongoing management activities,” van Zoggel said. “We pride ourselves on holistic vendor engagement, which means that we enable technical capability, partner program initiation and sales induction training in a smooth and constant motion.”
While a new alliance in terms of go-to-market strategy, Outcomex previously delivered value-added Radware solutions specific to DDoS, integrating with Cisco Firepower security appliances. The business also recently completed ISO 27001 certification in June which recognises competency in maintaining data confidentiality, integrity and availability.
“We formally partnered up with Radware upon recognising the need to further expand our portfolio to include best-in-breed cloud-based DDoS and WAF solutions which Radware is a market leader in,” noted Arjun De, director of Technology at Outcomex. “We’ve been developing our relationship with Radware to be able to add such offerings to our customers, ensuring the widest frontage of protection for their environments.”
As outlined by De, Outcomex currently provides a range of cyber security services including penetration testing and vulnerability assessments, with the addition of DDoS and WAF solutions built by Radware designed to enable deeper application security coverage.
“Radware’s machine learning capabilities provide maximum protection while ensuring the management overhead of traditional WAF solutions are kept to a minimum” De explained. “Implementations can also be managed on an operational basis by our MSS team based in Australia.”
According to Yaniv Hoffman -- vice president of sales across Australia, New Zealand, and Japan at Radware -- effective application security remains “top of mind for organisations” in response to a significant rise in cyber attacks as well as an accelerated shift to the cloud.
“With Radware’s leading technology and the Outcomex customer delivery promise, we can offer Australian customers best-in-class cloud application security solutions -- regardless of where their applications are hosted and where they move,” Hoffman added.
